


you're high in your castle

by thehaakun



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/F, Modern AU, Twins, band au, slight K-On! AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22182532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehaakun/pseuds/thehaakun
Summary: Up until that moment, Edelgard had never believed in love at first sight.But maybe there’s something about love at first...song.---[F!Byleth/Edelgard] Edelgard finds out that the new guitarist for Dorothea's band can open a door to her heart.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 9
Kudos: 172





	you're high in your castle

**Author's Note:**

> for reference this fic is inspired not only by K-On! but by "Graves" by CHVRCHES and i highly rec you listen to Graves b/c it's a good song lol
> 
> YET ANOTHER AU FIC FROM ME LOL and yes this is Twin!Byleths AU because I need. a keyboardist. LOL thank you m!byleth

When Dorothea first brings up the idea of forming a band to Edelgard, Edelgard thinks she’s joking.

Standing in the long unused music club room, Edelgard turns up her nose at the very, very visible layer of dust on the floor, the shelves, the walls. She can’t even recall the last time someone had used the room, let alone the last time the music club had even had members (had she even been alive?), so she’s skeptical when Dorothea does a fanciful flourish of her hand at her newfound territory.

“Doesn’t it look great, Edie? We can have our practices in here and everything!” Dorothea’s practically beaming with optimism, wiggling her eyebrows, and Edelgard can’t help but bite back a laugh.

“Yeah, it’s... _ great.” _ Edelgard turns around, tossing her hair over her shoulder and making to leave the room. “Good luck with your b--”

“Edie!  _ Wait!” _

Edelgard turns to see a Dorothea with the most severe, extreme, puppy-dog face, hands clasped in prayer in front of her.

“But Edie, remember when we made that promise?” she sniffs, little tears at the corners of her eyes.

Rolling her eyes, Edelgard sighs and turns around, waiting for the fireworks.

Dorothea, as expected, turns up the ante on her performance. “We promised, we’d become stars together! Remember when we saw that one band concert together, and we were going to do the same thing, and we made that wonderful, beautiful promis--”

“No, we didn’t. You’re just making shit up. And we watched a janky video tape recording of KISS.”

Dorothea drops the act like cold turkey. She lets out a heavy, tired sigh. “Okay,  _ fine.  _ But c’mon. Music club has to be better than whatever boring club you were going to sign up for.”

Biting her lip, because Dorothea’s  _ right, _ as she always is, Edelgard feels her club application to the debate club shrivel up in the pocket of her jacket.

“C’mon. At least try with me,” says Dorothea, and she extends a hand out, a genuine grin on her face.

Edelgard considers her friend for a long moment, but the longer she looks at Dorothea’s sweet, hopeful face, she finds her resolve crumbling.

It’s Dorothea. Maybe the band thing could work.

So she agrees to be its manager, because why not support her friend’s dream?

\---

One way or another, Dorothea somehow manages to either blackmail, conscript, trick, or recruit others to join their club (Edelgard doesn’t question it). There’s the overenthusiastic blue-haired dude named Caspar with a tendency to bang it out on the drums like he’s a rockstar, and then there’s the innocent foreign exchange student, Petra, who can actually play bass pretty well (music’s a universal language, after all). 

Dorothea, naturally, takes vocals.

“You sure you don’t wanna be a part of the band, Edie? You can sing with me, you know.” Dorothea does that thing where she bats her eyes at Edelgard, putting on her most powerful  _ ‘pretty please’ _ face but they’ve known each other for years now. Edelgard doesn’t fall for it, and she gets back to doing the paperwork for the club.

Despite the two new members, they still need two extra hands to make their club an official one. Besides, it’d help to have someone on lead guitar and someone on keyboard too.

While Dorothea has Caspar and Petra get to cleaning the club room (“It’s your initiation ritual!”), she and Edelgard get to work on making flyers to advertise the newly-reformed music club and what other way to attract a guitarist and keyboardist to their new club than--

“Dorothea, your art sucks,” Edelgard says, looking over at Dorothea’s hand-drawn flyer.

“Yours does too. Mine just sucks less.” Dorothea laughs, nudging Edelgard with her elbow as the two sit at the club room table.

“Mine does  _ not _ suck. At least this looks like a guitar and keyboard. I don’t know what amoeba thing you have going on there, but that’s not a guitar and keyboard.”

After some time (and a lot of erasing, crumpled up papers, and furiously scribbled crayon lines), they find a suitable, not-sucky looking flyer and post it up.

\---

Over the next week, people  _ do _ come and answer their flyer.

Just...not anyone they’re expecting.

The first day, they get a confident looking, red-haired boy who gives a sly wink at them all before whipping out a lute and singing bad, off tune love songs. It’s Petra who ends up cracking up first, laughing so hard that the boy flushes red, confused. Dorothea, doing her best to repress her own laugh, kindly rejects him.

The second day, some massively huge, grizzled man with a jet white beard comes stalking in, bizarrely wearing furs, half-naked, and equipped with a banged up guitar that looked like it’d seen war. He doesn’t answer their greetings, merely plugs his guitar into the amplifier, and lets rip a screaming note that almost breaks the glass windows of the club room. When they’re all struck speechless, he saunters right back out.

The third day, fourth day, fifth day...Edelgard loses count after a week or two because their hopes seem to diminish with each stranger that visits their club room with either weak skills, bizarre personality, or a combination of both (Caspar stills swears Sasquatch auditioned).

On the last day, when Edelgard’s all but about to give up and half-considering just learning guitar herself and forcibly conscripting Hubert from the occult club to join the music club, there’s a quiet, muted knock on the door of the clubroom. 

Then it tentatively slides open, and a girl and boy peek their heads in.

“Is this the music room?” the girl asks, her voice strangely toneless.

“Yes, yes! Welcome!” Dorothea flashes a smile, though Edelgard knows she’s just putting on airs. Dorothea can’t help but be welcoming and hospitable, after all (service jobs do that to you). “Here to audition?”

“Yes.” It’s the boy who answers this time, and Edelgard finds, as the boy and girl enter the room, that they’re twins. Indigo hair, bright blue eyes, same stature and builds, tall and lean. Their clothes are normal at least; the girl with a t-shirt, flannel tied around her waist, jean shorts, and boots, and the boy with a t-shirt of his own, with jeans and Converse. The girl has a guitar case slung on her back, the boy a keyboard slung behind him.

The strangest thing about them, Edelgard notices, is that their expressions are perfectly blank. If elevator music were personified, she had the feeling it’d look like the twins before her. The boy and girl get their gear set up, and both become prepared at just the same time -- they strangely move in sync too, both turning to look up at the current members of the music club as they stand ready.

“So, your names?” Edelgard asks; Dorothea, Petra, and Caspar sit next to her.

The boy and girl look at each other. They blink once, then look back at Edelgard.

“Bereth,” the boy says.

“Byleth,” the girl says.

“...Your names are...Bereth, and Byleth?” Petra asks, confused. “Bear? Bereth? Like...the animal?”

“Yes.”

“And...Byleth? Bye? Like...Goodbye?”

“Yes.”

“That’s pretty metal,” Caspar says with a grin. “I’m Caspar, like the ghost.”

“Cool,” Bereth says, his face obstinately expressionless.

Edelgar isn’t sure if the twins are just pulling her leg or if they’re really just that  _ weird, _ but she shakes her head and lets out a little sigh. 

“So, uh, why do you want to audition?” Dorothea asks. It’s just standard protocol to do some small talk, Dorothea’s always been one to try and relax others before performances.

“Our dad said we had to get out more,” Byleth says. 

Dorothea and Edelgard glance at each other.

“We like music. He told us to audition,” Bereth adds.

“That’s great!” Dorothea puts on an easygoing smile. “So, what song did you want to play?”

The two of them look at each other again, staring at each other for a few seconds. If Edelgard had believed in the occult like Hubert did, she’d believe for a moment that the twins were somehow telepathic or something, because they look back around at the same time.

“It’s a song we made,” Byleth says.

“Oh, cool. Original.” Caspar puts his hands behind his head, giving a little grin of his own. “Sounds good to me!”

“Alright, great! Let’s hear it then.” Dorothea sits back in her chair, giving a small gesture of her hand to show that the twins had the floor.

Byleth nods, as does Bereth, and then they hear the first guitar and keyboard note--

And they hear the first word Byleth sings.

\---

Up until that moment, Edelgard had never believed in love at first sight.

It’s a stupid concept, because how can anything like that be possible? There’s certainly no way someone like Edelgard could just fall in love with someone just by  _ looking _ at them.

But maybe there’s something about love at first...song.

Because that’s exactly what happens to Edelgard in those three minutes, and in those three minutes, Edelgard’s transported to an entirely new world of music -- she’s thrown straight out of that music club room and instead she’s in the stands of a massively huge concert, surrounded by other fans jumping up and down, cheering, screaming for the stars on stage.

Edelgards breathless, she’s not breathing, she can’t even hear the shouts of the fans all around her -- instead she’s somehow in her own insulated bubble, late at night, with desert stars far up high above her and a brilliant star right in front of her on that blazing, bright stage, and that star’s singing and playing guitar in a way that somehow calls to her.

Calls to  _ her, _ specifically, because Edelgard can’t explain it any other way. There’s no other way to explain the way she feels, the way her heart races in her chest, the way she feels herself stepping through the crowd, walking faster, pushing her way to the front -- now almost running --

She wants to reach the stage, she wants to see the most beautiful person she’s ever seen up close. She wants to see those nimble fingers strum the strings of that guitar, she wants to feel that deep rumble of bass in her chest, rattling her ribcage and reverberating through every part of her body.

Edelgard reaches just the edge of the barrier barricading the crowd from the stage; she’s so close yet so far but when she looks up again the singer’s looking right at her.

Right. At her.

Eyes, the color of a blue fire, gazing at her, singing those words that make her feel like they were aimed at  _ her, _ and her alone.

Without thinking, Edelgard reaches a hand out, trying to reach because she just wants to  _ touch-- _

_ “Edie!” _

A hand abruptly grabs her arm.

Then Edelgard’s suddenly jerked out of her fantasy concert world and suddenly she crash lands straight back into the music room and all the breath suddenly gets vacuum sucked into her lungs and she  _ gasps, _ so abruptly hurled back into reality. There’s no music anymore, just echoes of it in Edelgard’s ears, and there’s only the sound of Bereth’s and Byleth’s heavy breathing.

And now Edelgard finds herself standing right in front of Byleth, her hand extended out, an inch away from Byleth’s hand on her guitar.

When she looks up, her face is  _ so, _ so close to Byleth’s, and the guitarist just stares back at her, expression still  _ plain _ but those  _ eyes-- _

Dorothea, behind her, gives another shake of her arm. “Edie? You just  _ got up _ and walked over--”

“You’re in,” Edelgard breathes, still looking at Byleth’s super,  _ super, _ hot face. How did Edelgard not find her beautiful before? This person had to be the most hottest, most attractive person she’d ever seen. “You’re in the band.”

\---

It’s an automatic vote. Petra and Caspar had similarly been struck dumb, speechless, silent, awed, and captivated by the twins’ performance. Though they hadn’t reacted the way Edelgard had, they’d had to be brought back to reality by Dorothea shaking them back to earth. Edelgard can’t fathom how Dorothea had kept her shit together during the most brilliant song any of them had ever heard, but Dorothea says that she’d very,  _ very,  _ reluctantly pulled herself out of the throes of music when she’d seen Edelgard making her way forward.

Afterward, Dorothea suggests that the newly completed Music Club go out for boba tea, and so the team does, the club members excitedly asking questions to their new twin members.

Byleth and Bereth seem receptive to their questions, albeit their answers are short, plain, and simple -- just like them. 

But Edelgard finds it so  _ bizarre. _ One second Byleth had lit up her entire world like a thousand fireworks and the next Byleth looked as plain as a piece of bread. What the hell?

Except now when Edelgard catches herself stealing looks at Byleth, her heart does skips in her chest. It’s so  _ unfathomable _ that she,  _ Edelgard von Hresvelg, _ could possibly fall head over heels that fast. She reins herself in, calming the beating of her heart, and when their little group sits down at a table in the tea shop with boba teas in hand, she gets to work on hyperfocusing on drinking and not choking on her boba because if she doesn’t, she’ll just get back to staring at the most  _ beautiful-- _

Catching herself, Edelgard shakes her head, trying to clear it -- but then she notices that Byleth’s sat down right next to her.

Somehow, by some miracle, Edelgard manages to get through the next hour in a calm and collected manner. As in, she didn’t say anything the entire time and instead focused on how Byleth’s shoulder brushed hers when she lifted her arm to drink -- and  _ oh, _ Byleth’s arm! Those  _ biceps! _ Edelgard almost chokes on a pearl.

When she survives to the end of their little get together, Byleth and Bereth stand up to go, and Edelgard finds herself looking up into Byleth’s face.

Then, like her song, Byleth speaks to her.

“Did you like my song?” Byleth asks, softly.

Mouth dry, Edelgard says, “Yeah.”

And then, the final arrow sinks itself straight into Edelgard’s heart, and she knows there’s only one song, and one singer, meant for her.

Byleth smiles at her.

Then she reaches her hand out, and Edelgard finds herself taking it, and Byleth helps her out of her seat.

“See you around,” Byleth says, still with that little, tiny smile. 

Then she and her brother are gone, and Edelgard’s left standing there with no air in her lungs and no thoughts in her head and a million butterflies in her stomach.

“Well,” Dorothea says, laughing at the table while Petra and Caspar shoot grins at each other. “Seems like someone’s heard a love song.”

**Author's Note:**

> i punched this out in like a night because LIKE. GRAVES IS JUST SO MOTIVATING LOL THIS SONG IS SUCH A BOP it's bangin man
> 
> this iS REALLY ONLY A ONE-SHOT I DO NOT INTEND ON CONTINUING THIS but imagine. club advisor Rhea. and she had previous historic rock days as Seiros in her metal Nabatean band. GIVE ME MY K-ON AU WHERE'S THE FE3H K-ON AU WHY IS EVERYONE SO WEAK
> 
> i went through a LOT of combinations of how their band was gonna be set up but I knew I wanted Petra there to be Dorothea's gf LOL and then I thought about putting Ferdie in this as either the drummer or the treasurer for the club but unfortunately he got cut for brevity, sorry ferdie lol  
> Caspar's on drums because he just strikes me as a drummer boy lol  
> Lorenz was going to be the StuCo person who tells them HEY YO UNEED 2 MORE PEOPLE IN UR CLUB TO BE OFFICIAL but he got cut too LOL  
> In a beta concept I had Hilda and Claude in the band too but I couldn't figure out a good place to put them in respect to instruments lol
> 
> in the far, far, future...edie does do vocals with byleth (cries tears) so yeah she does eventually take a role in the band too but for now she's just the manager lol
> 
> thanks for reading!!


End file.
